Mom inspires local parents through new approach to teaching special needs kids

Kathleen ThurberMidland Reporter-Telegram

Published 7:00 pm, Thursday, August 6, 2009

When Linda Kane's son Scott was 13, teachers told her he was past the point of being able to learn.

Their family had moved to different Texas school districts for several years looking for someone who could deal with Scott's Down syndrome, but teachers and doctors kept telling them the same thing - he would never function like other kids.

So she and her husband Lee decided to take Scott out of school. Using an approach they'd not heard of known as the neurodevelopmental approach, they started home schooling Scott. Within months he was recognizing words, communicating with the family and later learning to read.

"It literally changed his life," Kane said.

About 20 years after her first experience with the neurodevelopmental approach, Kane has dedicated her life to training in the approach and then teaching other parents in hopes of helping them reach their children who may be struggling with everything from Down syndrome to attention deficit disorder to autism.

She'll be hosting a workshop in Midland at 9 a.m. Saturday at First Baptist Church.

For parents who attend, Kane said, she simply wants them to walk away with hope and understanding.

While every child is different, she said, part of reaching children with learning disabilities and other special needs is understanding and then targeting the root causes of their issues.

Kids who have Down syndrome, Kane said, often get left behind when in mainstream settings because there's nothing to help keep their specific central nervous system improving.

Given the proper stimulation at the right level of intensity, though, she said many kids can develop like their peers.

"The potential is there it's just whether we can tap into it," she said.

For Scott, she said, the education at home allowed him to become a semi-independent adult before passing away because of respiratory and thyroid issues in 2006.

Kane said they'd considering adopting a child with Down syndrome so they could provide him or her with proper stimulation from the start, but instead decided to take their mission on the road and help hundreds of parents and children throughout the years. She travels to Midland several times each year to work with families.

Midlander Kim Stokes has been working with Kane to use the approach with her 5-year-old son Adley for years and said after being told by doctors he would be retarded has instead watched as Adley has learned to read and do math before his peers.

"It has given us just so much hope for his future," Kim Stokes said.

The process, Stokes said, is time intensive - she goes through therapy with her son every day after school.

Plus, Kane said, for some kids, improvement may come in small victories and not in big steps like learning to read.

But, they said, after being told by others not to expect any normality in their kids' lives, any changes were nice to see.

"If parents are looking for hope they're going to get hope," Kane said.